G-Cloud Store Back Online After ‘Host Error’

The Cabinet Office has blamed an error at its platform provider for an outage that hit the G-Cloud store yesterday.

The issue has now been fixed after the Government E-Marketplace team, which runs the G-Cloud CloudStore, coordinated with ProcServe, the software and hosting company which underpins the government’s e-commerce strategy, to get things up and running, TechWeekEurope was told by the Cabinet Office.

According to updates on Twitter, problems began around midday yesterday and the Cabinet Office said everything was back to normal by 8am this morning. “The G-Cloud is operating normally again,” a spokesperson told TechWeekEurope.

The outage was caused by a scheduled update on the ProcServe side. It prevented suppliers from uploading services onto the marketplace and prevented people looking at what was on offer too.

Outage outrage

A number of people complained to the Cabinet Office, letting them know there was an issue. But this is the second outage the CloudStore has experienced this year. After the launch of the first iteration of the store, when it was hosted on Microsoft’s Azure platform, it went down because of a leap-year bug.

The second version of the CloudStore was launched in May, following a number of delays, and the G-Cloud decided to switch hosts onto Procserve alongside the E-Marketplace.

Fear of outages remains a big concern for those considering cloud. Earlier this month, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was hit by severe storms, taking down a number of big-name sites using its infrastructure, including Netflix and Instagram.

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